


binding with briars, my joys & desires

by Laliandra



Category: Peter Darling - Austin Chant
Genre: Future Fic, M/M, an unexpected amount of poetry feelings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-18
Updated: 2017-12-18
Packaged: 2019-02-16 07:33:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,100
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13049439
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Laliandra/pseuds/Laliandra
Summary: after neverland, a man who must grow up





	binding with briars, my joys & desires

**Author's Note:**

  * For [FairestCat](https://archiveofourown.org/users/FairestCat/gifts).



> merry merry, Fairestcat! This one ended up with more feelings and less plot than I was expecting but I hope you enjoy! Also your letter contained prompts for some of my very favourite books and authors in the world so I have maybe put in an easter egg or two <3

James arrived home from town with groceries and fripperies and, of course, a tribute to his Pan, couldn’t possibly return without one both for Peter’s sake and his own. He had missed having someone to spoil and Peter reveled in it. He called around the house a few times and with a sigh of inevitably went to the river. 

 

Peter and his typewriter were not in a tree for a blessed once, but they were both ensconced in the large chair that James kept on his tiny dock, one furiously clacking never-stilled creature of imagination. It felt often that this age was made for Peter, the brightest youngest thing of them all. James was sure that in another life he would be happily ensconced in a Berlin club or some such, the darling of every artiste, dilettante and reprobate but Peter seemed content enough to be a wild child of the woods and only James’s darling. James stood and watched him for a while until Peter called, with an ostentatious stretch, “You’re still as loud as ever, pirate.” 

 

“I was never the one with the tricks,” James said as he approached and lay his parcels at Peter’s temptingly bare feet where they stuck out the rug that he was wrapped in. There had been a frost that morning, a shimmering sheen on the world that James had watched disappear with his coffee from safely in their warm kitchen, but Peter was always utterly himself even in a world where the weather would not bend to his whims. Peter bent graciously to kiss him, that stubborn glorious mouth caught in a laugh and James said, “Hello, dearest, did you miss me?” Peter had a somewhat complicated relationship with endearments, got spooked by some and outright hurt by others - never beautiful, never again - but dearest suited them both very well. 

 

“Hardly noticed you were gone,” Peter said which could be a teasing lie or the outright truth. Getting lost in fantasy worlds was a skill that he hadn’t lost on leaving one, along with a silent tread and a wild dash of carelessness. James was well aware that he spent too much time cataloging Peter, the sameness and the difference of Peter and Pan, as well as the rather daft mundane things that came with sharing a house with another person, and the adoring detail of a man with a smitten, well, obsession. He said, “When are you going to let me paint you?” because at least then he would have a reason for this. 

 

Peter shrugged, the stolen shawl he was wearing falling off one shoulder. “I can’t let you get everything your own way. Maybe for next Christmas I’ll allow it.” He put his typewriter aside, however, and pulled James into the chair with him, half in his lap. 

 

James laughed. “You make it sound like you don’t put up a fight for everything, which we both know isn’t true.” There was a gloriously purple mark in the exposed hollow of Peter’s throat as visible evidence to the contrary and more secreted down his body as further proof. James pressed a light finger to it and raised his eyebrows to prove his point and Peter shivered entirely, like a willow in a breeze. 

 

There had been a time when they fought to the point of almost breaking, not for pleasure but entirely in pain. Peter, when confronted with the soft reality of his body here, had retreated to all the hard, harsh men that he had ever known, feared, and idolised. Men did not back down. Men did not compromise. Men fought. It had been like watching a wild creature try and tear itself apart and James had known he could not dress this wound or leech this poison all himself, that however much it hurt to watch it hurt more to live. He could only carry on loving Peter with the same fierce bright sharpness that had lived in him since Peter had flown back into his grey life and cut it open, and he didn’t know how to show him that this too came with bravery, just to live, to be kind, to do all things with love. They had been saved, in part, by Peter falling in love with poetry, with the words of men who had gone to war and come back, and those who had not. James couldn’t stand to read it but Peter had filled their kitchen table with volume after volume, with all the old classics of heroes and with men that the world could not call heroes yet but James already knew would in a better age. Peter would try and explain the things that he was seeing in their pages, and night after night in their small bed he would pour out words like a bloodletting. War was all he had ever wanted, and these men had got it, and suddenly James could talk too, about the world he had lived through, about the other side of this world ending horror, about the friends who hadn’t lived to it and the ones who had but were gone all the same. Their poisons seeped out via the pages, via all these other men trying to find a way to make sense of unthinkable things, of all the things man invented poetry to try and describe. James would never quite get all the strange modern things that Peter was still badgering him to try, his current preference for the Fragmentalists and the one about fishponds that he quoted constantly but he would be forever grateful to them. 

 

He talked back in paintings. 

 

He hadn’t hidden any of them from Peter even at the start when they were all elbows with each other. Even the ones he kept turned to the walls. Let him look at the ones that he painted in rages and in ugly unpleasant grief. Peter was remarkably at good at reading them which had been wonderful and terrifying all at once, as being extremely known always was. That was another reason why he wanted to paint his lover, so that Peter could read all the brushstrokes and find the story of the two of them in them, every adoring stroke, every new burst of colour that he had brought into James’s life. 

  
“What will you give me in return for a sitting?” Peter said. His eyes were fixed on James, clear like the waters of mermaid lagoon and just as deadly. 

 

James said, “Why don’t you tell me what you want,” and stole another kiss. “And then we can negotiate.” 


End file.
